Climate Resilience Then and Now: A Conversation with Andy Lipkis

We recently got the opportunity to sit down with Andy Lipkis, the founder and former President of TreePeople.

TreePeople—which Lipkis founded when he was only 18 (🤯) back in 1973—is one of the largest environmental organizations with an HQ in Southern California. They have engaged and supported more than 3 million people to take climate resilient action by planting and caring for more than 2 million trees across SoCal’s neighborhoods, mountains, parks, and forests.

To say that Lipkis has had an outsized impact on making LA more climate resilient would be an understatement. In fact, the Society of American Foresters and the American Society of Landscape Architects have, respectively, granted him the honorary titles of Forester and Landscape Architect in recognition of his life’s work. Pretty prestigious stuff.

We thought that Lipkis would be a great person to talk to about the past, present, and future of climate resilience in and around LA. We hope you feel the same way after reading!

Note: This interview is edited for clarity.

An interview with Andy Lipkis

Dashboard.Earth (DBE): Do you ever look back and think, “How did I found TreePeople when I was only 18?”

Andy Lipkis (AL): It seems crazy and miraculous, but it actually started when I was 15 when I was a summer camper in the San Bernardino mountains. Each summer, my parents sent me and my brothers up into the mountains to escape LA’s air pollution. I fell in love with the forest because of its beauty and clean air–in part because I could breathe without feeling my lungs burn. In the summer of 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, we learned that the same air pollution from Los Angeles was killing the forest.

DBE: How did learning about pollution affect the rest of your summer?

AL: Researchers found that there were some trees that were smog-resistant that could survive in the air pollution. The Forest Service ranger told us that no one was reforesting with the resistant trees, but that we young people could save the forest if we started to do it. That maybe others would follow.

What followed was three weeks of transforming an old dirt parking lot in the middle of our summer camp. We pulled up a 4 inch layer of tar and dirt, and replaced it with mulch, soil and seedlings of Sugar pines, Coulter pines, Incense Cedars and even a few Sequoias.. By the time the project was done, we transformed a dead space into something that was living and thriving and beautiful.

It was three weeks of backbreaking work, and was also one of the best summers in my life.

It made me want to do a lot more, to see my energy used for something that could turn around the environmental crisis that we'd all just learned about on the first Earth Day.

DBE: How did that summer shape your mission going forward?

AL: I had been raised as an activist. And I also had that good fortune of parents who didn't impose limits on what's possible.

It took me three years of trying and failing before I actually launched TreePeople when I was 18. And I quit many times when I hit what seemed to be insurmountable roadblocks. But I learned a whole lot by trying to figure out what to do, where to plant, how to get trees, permits, funding and all of that.

I had found trees in a state-run nursery and I was ready to buy them but I didn't have the money. The state’s policy was to kill surplus trees, and they weren’t allowed to give them away. I called state legislators to no avail, (it seemed they dismissed my plea because I was a kid), and when that didn’t work I called the LA Times. A Times reporter called the governor's office and THAT managed to stop them from killing the trees. Then they told the story. They told people I needed 50 cents per tree, and thousands of people, especially kids, sent 50 cents, or $1 and within a few days we had the money to launch and I’ve never stopped ever since.

“We all have tremendous impact. The commercial system doesn't want us to know that. They tell us the way to get everything we need — food, safety, and a sense of our power — is only by being consumers. But our actions and our work together make a difference. They have an impact.”

DBE: What do you think is the biggest difference between LA’s potential to be climate resilient today versus when you were a 15-year-old camper?

AL: There was no awareness of the dangers of climate threats back then. So that's one huge difference: now we actually are aware of the crisis. There is still profound denial and a profound lack of literacy about severe and extreme climate threats, why we need to be resilient and what it means. And that is preventing meaningful action that can protect people and communities.

DBE: That makes sense. Does the awareness make you hopeful?

AL: Am I more hopeful or less hopeful? Oh man. I'm always a mix of vision, enthusiasm, and when I fail, I'm temporarily very less hopeful.

Today, we are more divided politically, we have more animosity, we're less willing to reach out to our neighbors, and that is disastrous. Neighbor to neighbor mutual aid, people helping each other despite our differences, is really what's required to succeed and accelerate climate resilience.

DBE: Can you talk more about why the political division worries you?

AL: Right now our infrastructure and emergency services are not designed or scaled to protect people from the growing magnitude and impacts of severe and extreme climate events, like wildfires, floods, heat waves, and droughts. We can do two things immediately to help. We the people CAN and MUST work together, despite our political differences, to plan and prepare to help each other and save lives in extreme events.

DBE: What do you think we should be working together to do?

This may sound like wishful thinking, but I’ve led two major “Crowd-Sourced” flood disaster relief operations in Los Angeles: in 1978 and 1980, where thousands of people from all political perspectives came together to sandbag and protect homes from mudslides and flooding, when the event was so big, the emergency agencies were swamped. We can anticipate some of the disasters and we can prepare people to help each other. Waiting for the disasters to strike will be too late, because we need to have locally available water for fire fighting, and things like solar powered cooling installed in homes and community centers in the hottest, most disadvantaged communities. People need to be prepared to help each other. That means neighbors gathering to talk, learn and plan.

We also, of course, need to be making the city as a whole more and more resilient. That starts with capturing and storing rainwater in tanks and installing rain gardens at homes and in neighborhoods… having it available, using that water to grow a robust cooling, shading tree canopy that can reduce the peak temperatures enough to enable most people to survive the extreme heat. But we also need the backup of solar powered heat pumps for air conditioning when it gets extremely hot.

DBE: How do you think Dashboard.Earth can help?

AL: The key word is “dashboard”. We need feedback. Humans and all living things rely on feedback. If you get too hot, you have to cool yourself down. If you get too cold, you’ve got to warm yourself up. Our body works on feedback. Our brains work on feedback; our communities work on feedback. And it's really important to give people a glimpse of their impacts both damaging AND healing.

We all have tremendous impact. The commercial system doesn't want us to know that. They tell us the way to get everything we need — food, safety, and a sense of our power — is only by being consumers. But our actions and our work together make a difference. They have an impact. And if we don't get feedback to do more problem solving, and less destructive activity, we get deeper into trouble.

The vision of Dashboard.Earth is to complete the feedback loops that have been removed from the public conversation and to give us positive feedback when we're taking positive actions.

For the most part if you're doing good climate resilient work, there's no mechanism to give you encouragement. To give you guidance and to say hey, keep going. Here's more resources, you are making a difference. And that's what the initial vision of Dashboard.Earth was. To give you information about climate and give you opportunities within your home, your neighborhood, your region to take action that makes a difference and then to show you the collective impact of that.

That way you learn you're not alone. And so you get the message and support for staying engaged, upping your game and attracting more people to join in. We're actually beginning to move the needle. That feedback is extraordinarily important. Period.

DBE: Are there any other things Angelenos can do to be more climate resilient?

AL: Meet with your neighbors and talk about the threats together. Talk about what you might do as a block, as a neighborhood, to be able to help each other – whether it's classic disaster preparedness or more capturing water, growing food, sharing food. Demand that the city take more action to help you prepare. There's much more to know…but it's most important to ask the question: “where am I needed and how can I help”… and then respond, learn, and repeat.